From Wikipedia “In common law jurisdictions, slander refers to a malicious, false and defamatory spoken statement or report.” Unruh’s spoken statement qualifies as all three.

When you say that “those decisions” are driven “just by the right price,” what do you mean by “right price?” The price of the company’s stock, the amount of profit or the profit margin, or the price of a bribe?

Your citation from Matthew seems to imply that you think that “companies” in general – or the people who work for them – actually don’t have any ethics, regardless of whether they have a written “code”? And simply look at the profit projects as the normative criteria for making an ethical decision?

If that’s the case, then they clearly don’t have “situational ethics.” They only have an ethic that is determined by…whatever you mean by “right price.”

In Mark 7: 11-12, Jesus says this: “But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban’ (that is, a gift devoted to God),then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother.”

The “provision” is that the man is making a gift devoted to God. Jesus doesn’t seem to think that the refusal to waive it was an expression of the highest ethics.

And Unruh’s comment — “companies don’t like to miss out on profits, so the safety valve is allowing them to sacrifice their ethics if the price is right.” — just strikes me as a wholesale slander, which neither he nor you even pretend to quantify.

Do people at all levels of a company make un-ethical decisions? Yes. Are those decisions *necessarily* driven by free market principles? No.